Pub Conversation: Becky Shaw & Steven Eastwood

Self Service and Pub Conversations.

In 2006 through to 2008, Self Service initiated a programme of talks taking place at the Lamp Tavern in Birmingham.

Each Self Service member chose an artist or person of influence to their practice who was in turn invited to nominate someone they would like to have a public conversation with. Topics of conversation were held entirely open and reflected the interests and enthusiasms of the artists nominated.

Each conversation was recorded and released as a podcast, however the Pub Conversations website no longer exists so the files are re-posted here by way of an archive. All posts related to the Pub Conversations series can be found at www.npugh.co.uk/tag/pub-conversations/.

Self Service is a constantly evolving group of Birmingham based artists who originally came together in 2004, with the aim of generating projects which would create intimacy and enable the development of dialogue amongst the disparate groups and practitioners in Birmingham who made up a somewhat fragmented visual arts community.

At the time of Pub Conversations, Self Service consisted of Tom Bloor, Jo Capper, Mona Casey, Faye Claridge, Ruth Claxton, Greg Cox, John Hall, Cheryl Jones, Nikki Pugh, Liz Rowe, Charlotte Smith and Matt Westbrook

The talks were supported by Arts Council, UCE and Business Link.

Becky Shaw & Steven Eastwood, July 2007

Becky Shaw has been making work that explores the relationship between individual and social since 1993. Projects often involve humorous and sometimes critical contributions to public and private contexts including hospitals, universities, business parks, factories and shops. The resulting works combine live elements, photography, made elements, writing and speaking, and may reverse or misuse existing processes. New works have been commissioned by organisations including Grizedale Arts, New Art Gallery Walsall and Kunstprijs Amstelveen, Netherlands. Becky spent three years making work in response to Liverpool Marie Curie Centre, for PhD research. Current projects include a response to Firstsite’s new building in Colchester, an exploration of retail and regeneration in Preston, and a collaboration with Joanna Spitzner, USA,that explores the American and British car industries. Becky is Research Fellow at ICIA, University of Bath, attempting to follow one object all the way back through its manufacturing process as a way to understand contemporary objectivity and subjectivity. Between 2000 and 2006 Becky was co-director of Static, Liverpool.

Her guest, Steven Eastwood, is a filmmaker whose practice spans experimental fiction, documentary and essay film, artists’ moving image and live art. His films collapse the vernacular of the cinema and the documentary, appropriating and then misusing many of the conventions of a dominant cultural media, and taking the form into unusual contexts. Some of the films are performances; others are
interventions or drifts that involve strangers, others still are unsettling in their willful lack of direction (literally) or conclusion. Steven has exhibited at the ICA, BAFTA, EMAF, Brief Encounters, the Lux Centre and Anthology Film Archives, amongst others. Recent installations include The Film, The Film, The Film at MM Luka Gallery Croatia (2006). Steven has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards, has written conference papers and chapters on filmmaking as a social situation and regularly programmes screenings of artists’ film and video. He recently curated two symposia, Interval (1) and (2), based on the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. He has lectured widely, and is currently on leave from his position as Assistant Professor in Film, SUNY Buffalo. Steven is about to complete a Ph.D through UCL The Slade, titled ‘Cinema into the Real’. In 1997 he formed the production company Paradogs; in 1996 he co-founded the Volcano! Underground film festival (1996-2000); and in1995 he formed OMSK, a platform (now a collective) for emerging artists with diverse practices.

www.cinemaintothereal.org

Pub Conversations from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/pubcon/Becky%20Shaw%20&%20Steven%20Eastwood%20120707.mp3]
[Download file]